Augusta DellÕOmo: Welcome to Right Rising, a podcast from the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. I'm your host Augusta DellÕOmo. Today I'm joined by Dr. Kathleen Belew, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and she's here with us today to talk about her latest book A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Kathleen, thank you so much for being here.

Kathleen Belew: Thank you for having me. 

AD: So Kathleen, could you just start a little bit off with us telling our audience and the Right Rising group here a bit about the book, and what really prompted the particular topic and project that you all are working on in this volume?

KB: You bet. So this is an edited collection that started as an academic conference with my colleague, Ramon Gutierrez, who works on anti-immigrant animus and anti-immigrant violence. And it occurred to us that even within the academy, the people who study these issues are often not in conversation with one another. So for instance, if you want to study anti-immigration, to get a full academic answer, you need to go to the law school, the History Department, the sociology department, the criminal studies departments. And, and even there, you won't find people really talking with each other in a scholarly way. And as we got into this, I was I was doing interviews for my first book, Bring the War Home. And I realized that journalists have even less to go on than we do. The Associated Press style guide does very little in orienting people even about these issues, much less how they're interconnected. So the field guide is really meant as sort of a beginning point for a more well-rounded set of conversations around the disparate sort of studies of white supremacy, legal exclusion, white power, violence, anti-immigrant and nativist violence, anti-gay, anti-female violence, and then some best practices about language and usage meant to help journalists.

AD: Fantastic. Kathleen I wanted to say, you know, I've been very excited, I've been going through my copy of A Field Guide to White Supremacy. And I'm really excited about how approachable this volume is. It's something that I think is for not just sort of practitioners and policymakers, but for everyday interested observers of the far-right, and you start the book off with a quote, and I'm reading here from the volume: Òwe focus here, not only on the most catastrophic incidents of white supremacist domestic terrorism, like the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, and more recent mass shootings at stores and places of worship, and the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol, but also on the manifold ways that covert and overt white supremacy supported by often violent patriarchy and gender norms have shaped American law, life and policy.Ó And I really love this dual focus and it's something that we've talked a lot about in the podcast. But can you talk a little bit about what prompted that dual focus from all of the writers in this volume and how are the various aspects and chapters of the book really hitting it that?

KB: For me, this comes from the sort of media journey I've had with Bring the War Home and talking to journalists and policymakers and communities about how to confront the problem of white power violence. And what you run into almost immediately is that you can't dismantle white power violence without also attending to structural racism in our society and individual racist belief outside of extremist groups. So if you take something like the Greensboro shooting, which is central to my first book, this is the 1979 United Racial Front opening fire on leftist demonstrators bringing together Klansmen and Neo Nazis in the same action. That event is horrific for the act of violence itself in 1979. But the real problems also in that story, are the fact that we were not able to get a conviction of those gunmen at state trial, federal trial and mostly in a civil court suit, too. So what we have to think about is okay, so how is white power violence not only a problem, you know, at the moment of the violent action, but why can't we hold actors accountable, what's going on with our legal instruments and jury instruction, what's going on with the way we tell stories about this in the press, because it the failure of confrontation, is is huge and goes across all levels of our society.

AD: This is really helpful for that framing Kathleen, and I'd like to walk through each of the sections in the book and give our listeners an idea of some of the main ideas that they will encounter when they read A Field Guide to White Supremacy. And you've already mentioned the Associated Press style book, and this was something that I had never seen before in any of the sort of far right books that I read for my own work and you all recommend a series of changes. And you touched a little bit on this at the beginning. But can you talk about what prompted these recommendations and perhaps give our listeners of a few examples of the kinds of changes that you recommend and why that's so important?

KB: Absolutely. So somewhere along the way, with Bring the War Home publicity, I found out that what I was mostly doing for journalists was just sort of context and orientation. And out of curiosity, I went to look up like, what do they have about this problem in their main style book that governs newsroom sort of thinking and reporting. And, you know, it's striking that there's a long section on ISIS and a section on al-Qaeda. There's even a section on the Irish Republican Army, which has not been on my mind lately. I don't know about everybody else. What the what they had for the alt-right was outdated and incomplete. And they had nothing about the Klan, the white power movement, neo-Nazism, skinheads, much less the current day groups that people are reporting on and asking a lot of questions about like Oathkeepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Atomwaffen, the Base, we could go on Boogaloo. So the guide sets out to sort of correct some of those things. And it does this in several other fields, too. And I think, in all cases, what we're trying to do is not tell anybody how to run their newsroom. And I think actually, you know, these are these are suggestions meant to start a conversation rather than policy recommendations for this reason. We don't run newsrooms, we don't know. We don't want to try to govern their practice of updating the book. But there are places where historians and other academics have specialized knowledge that can be of help in considering those recommendations. For instance, we know that over the long 20th century, every time there has been actually longer than that the 19th century to every time there has been the arrival of a new group of immigrants. We see language like a tide, a wave, a flood or a swarm, a horde, right? So metaphors that are about being overrun or about kind of pestilential threat. We also know that when that kind of language is used, it is often I think, always accompanied by vigilante violence and backlash against those communities. So it's a very straightforward thing to add to a style guide, don't use this kind of a metaphor, because it has over many hundreds of years had the following impact.

AD: That's really helpful Kathleen, and I want to touch as I'm a historian, you're as well, and I'd love to talk a little bit now about the way that history is really used in this project. And Part one is called ÒBuilding, Protecting and Profiting from Whiteness.Ó And it brings together two really important histories the history of settler colonialism in the history of racial capitalism in the United States. So for our listeners, why are these two strands so important to understanding contemporary white supremacy? And what does this tell us about perhaps the American body politic in our past and in our current moment?

KB: Yes. So for listeners, broad listeners, and if you are new to this set of language, maybe this is a good time to pause and talk about what I mean when I talk about these terms. So white supremacy in our guide, is both structural racism and individual racism. So we might think of it as a big wooden fence, like the kind that's in the backyard. Racial violence is one board, right. And the fence was erected by people who will tell you that they believe in the superiority of white people. And there are people going along mending the fence all the time. But there are all these other planks, like the legal system that doesn't work equally, our inequality in maternal fetal health outcomes, or educational outcomes or incarceration, or disparity of wealth, or landholding, and all of those things together are white supremacy. So it's not enough to pull off one plank of the fence or to simply say, I am not individually racist, let me walk away from this, and I'm fine because the fence is still standing. So this orientation is about understanding that interlocking set of problems and then pulling them down. So underlying that construction of white supremacy are two huge pieces of violent history that are simply inescapable. One is settler colonialism, which is simply the idea that there were other people here before the United States, and many of them were violently displaced to make room for the country we now live in. And in some places, that process is still happening. And the other is racial capitalism, which is that from the beginning, the capitalist system, both profited from slavery, and profited from the construction and protection of white supremacy. So there's a bunch of other histories attached to these two things. We could look at the history of who was and wasn't allowed to immigrate to the United States as we do in the Field Guide, who was and wasn't allowed to exercise full citizenship. And you know, this is exactly the set of stories that I think people find very disconcerting. This is what people I believe, are often reacting to when they are talking about critical race theory as a problem in our education system. Although, of course, that's not what that means Ð we can talk about that too. But the thing is that this is not a sad story, I think, because what it shows us is that we have these in this very imperfect land that was started with these fundamental acts of violence, there was nevertheless this huge democratic experiment, and promises of unalienable rights, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Now, that wasn't for me or for you, when it was written that was only for white, free, property-owning men. But the story is about how over time, different groups of people have come together, stood together and demanded inclusion and that radical promise and that was never handed out by people as a favor, that was demanded and organized and people worked hard for their own agency across this whole story. And we need look no further than attacks on voting rights today to see that this is still a project that's very much in progress. But all of this together is about what we could call like the Òidea of AmericaÓ Òthe idea of the United States,Ó which is can we or can we not fulfill that promise?

AD: I really like that framing Kathleen, of you know, what is the idea of America? And it's something that's continually contested, not just among sort of more reasonable actors, but amongst white supremacist thought. And an important point that the book makes in section two, which is called ÒIterations of White SupremacyÓ is that white supremacy relies on structures of power beyond just racism. So how does racism interweave with issues like Semitism, anti-feminism, and homophobia?

KB: So in that section of the book, what we're looking at is sort of the way that all of these complexities of inequality come together to support and enforce this one big system white supremacy, which I mean, I think this book makes a compelling case that this is one of the fundamental forces in American public life. And so what we're looking at in that section is about the ways that white patriarchy, which is to say, gender normativity, and women's roles within this system have been operationalized, by white supremacy. And, you know, in my work, one place this appears is is in the emphasis on white women's reproduction, excuse me, and the policing of white women's sexuality in order to sort of patrol the purity of the race. But in these these essays, we have a fantastic piece by Rebecca Solnit, which I'm, you know, I've been teaching a class for a while now. And she was gracious and let us reprints in this volume, that sort of shows how much violence against women has been used over time to sort of create and sustain this, this system, we might extrapolate a little bit further at people who cross those gender lines, and that's what we're really looking at in the homophobia and anti-trans violence essays. 

AD: That's really helpful, Kathleen, especially because and I've often encountered this, as I've done more public facing work and through this podcast is, we often don't feel incredibly comfortable talking about the ways that white supremacy engages in a particular kind of violence against women, and that while white women are very much complicit in the kinds of white supremacy that we see both violent and nonviolent aspects of this, there is an inherently violent aspect of white supremacy that manifests in many ways. And I think it's an important distinction that you all set out the beginning of the book about, there are these high level acts of violence, but they're undergirded by everyday acts of violence against women, people of color, queer people. And that's something that is really important for all of us to reckon with when we think about policy and how we actually combat these kinds of trends. And I want to turn now to the third section of the book, which focuses - its titled ÒAnti-Immigrant NationÓ and it focuses on the long arc of violent immigration policy in the US. And I think many of our listeners and myself included, are really most familiar with this role, the particular role that xenophobia plays in white supremacist ideologies. It's something that we saw with the Trump administration. However, what is unique about how immigration and anti-immigration rhetoric dovetails with white supremacist ideas of the nation and the state? 

KB: So one of the interesting things about the white power movement and I think that this is germane now because white power ideology is seeping so quickly and in really pernicious ways into our political mainstream is that it operationalizes a whole bunch of sort of capital C Conservative issues around the idea of threats to white reproduction. So we get anti-abortion belief, because of threats to white women's reproduction. Anti-immigration is because of the threat of being overrun anti, anti-gay, anti-feminist belief is about like women being in the reproductive role. And it goes on and on like this. But what it does is sort of refract what we could think of as abstract policy issues and turn them into, into deeply felt beliefs that have to do with a palpable state of emergency. And I think that this part is really important for seeing how you jump from, you know, neoconservatism in the 90s to January 6, right, there's a big difference between sort of abstract belief and political action to sort of the the feeling that the people believing that they're under attack and have to take radical approaches. And I think that that through line is sort of the roadmap to understanding where we have found ourselves today.

AD: IÕd like to stay with this idea of this through line that you're talking about is that seems to be a really important focus of the final section of the book, ÒWhite Supremacy from the Fringe the Mainstream,Ó which I think for many of our listeners is, the question that we're most concerned about is we're experiencing in our contemporary moment, what some have called a mainstreaming effect is far-right ideas become normalized in mainstream spaces. But I think what's really great about the field guide is that it contextualizes this mainstreaming within a more recent past, but also within a longer past of American history and its sort of broad historical arc. So how new really is this mainstreaming effect that we're currently experiencing or what is new about it? And what can the Field Guide tell us about the persistent role that white power plays in American politics?

KB: So I think that the really big difference and so when I'm talking about the White Power Movement, I'm talking about this one operationalized plank of the fence of white supremacy. So white power, to me refers to the coalition movement of skinheads, Klansmen, Neo-Nazis, radical tax resistors, the people that we would now think of as the militant right, including many militia groups, many groups in the white power space, and then some new, quote unquote, ÒWestern chauvinist groups: that are clearly white power in orientation. And the thing about this is that in the time of my study, in my first book, these groups took radical action against the state, because they believed that the door to politics was closed. And they wrote about this, they talked about the time for the ballot has passed, now is the time for the bullet. And they they declared war in the federal government, they went about amassing weapons and training themselves and carrying out active mass casualty violence. Today, that door is not closed to mainstream politics, we have, there was just a story that came out about 38 people who hold elected office have either ties to or membership in the Oathkeepers. That is a stunner. We, you know, militias are illegal in all 50 states. Or at least extra-legal militias, like the Oathkeepers are illegal in all 50 states. And if people would like to hear more about what I mean by the word militia, I'm not talking about national or state guard units when I say that. I'm talking about extra-legal, private armies, which are illegal in all 50 states. So we have politicians who are in the Oathkeepers, we have politicians who are not at all interested in figuring out what happened on January 6, who have directly attempted to distract people from the the role of white power ideology and things like the El Paso shooting. This is very, very concerning. So to me, there's sort of like a moment of decision here about will the White Power activists continue to mount guerrilla warfare? Or will they mount an authoritarian challenge to democracy? Both of those are bad. And both of those are scary in different ways. I think we'll probably see movement towards both of them until they figure out what they're doing, which is not an easy or clean process, as we know from history.

AD: And Kathleen as we're kind of finishing up I know something that is often on my mind and is often on a lot of our listeners minds at Right Rising is, you know, we want to talk about these issues. But we also want to think about where do we go from here? What sort of recommendations or what sort of ways forward does the Field Guide offer all of us whether we're interested observers or scholars or policymakers or journalists?

KB: Thank you for that question. Because I think that there is a lot of reason for hope, especially for people who are willing to get out and do the work in their communities and beyond. I think that the white power movement, particularly, but many of the issues that come up in the Field Guide have been with us for so long, because they really do operate across multiple levels of our society, which is to say, again, it's not just about personal belief, it's about personal belief and the white supremacy built into the jury selection process and the white supremacy built into our implicit bias and media reporting. So one very helpful thing people can do is just keep your attention on these stories. And I know that that is not a small ask, in the days of, you know, you open Twitter, and it's a fire hose of impossible coverage all the time. But like, the more we can keep people's attention here, particularly lawmakers attention here, the more we can get resources pointed at this issue. And I think there's actually a lot of reason for hope here. You know, as much as as a historian, I have my own doubts about the completeness of this as a solution. But the fact that the FBI and DHS have identified this as the most pressing terrorist threat to the United States does come with resources and people and boots on the ground and money and all kinds of resources that can help communities. And then the other thing that I think the Field Guide really shows is how much impacted communities have in common with each other. So in my subspecialty, particularly, we often read stories about El Paso is anti-Latinx violence and Pittsburgh is anti-Semitic violence, and Charleston is anti-black violence, and Christchurch was anti-Islamic violence. And they are those things. But those were all actions carried out by white power gunmen, with clear writing, talking about why they did those particular things with clear connections via ideology and social interaction and websites and images and even quoting each other's manifestos. So all of those impacted communities have something really important in common. And those communities don't all have the same access to media, to portrayal as victims, to resources, to authority. If they were to band together and begin to sort of organize that way. I think there's a great deal of hope there. And I would just note, that's all of us after January 6, we were attacked, our democracy was attacked. And banding together I think is the democratic solution to that problem.

AD: Kathleen, I think that is an incredible note to end on. And for our listeners, could you give us some details about how folks can preorder the book, any events that are coming up? And especially you know, where they can where they can get their hands on the Field Guide?

KB: Oh, sure. Thank you so much. So the Field Guide is on all of your local or online bookstores. Excuse me, if you go to my Twitter, which is @Kathleen_Belew, b e l e w, there is a code there for 30% off if you'd like to order it through University of California Press. And if you read it, we would love to know what you thought if you could leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon that helps other people to find it. So thank you very, very much.

AD: Kathleen, thank you so much for being here.

KB: Thank you for having me.

AD: This has been another episode of Right Rising. We'll see you all next time.